The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"Emotionally, It Has Never Left Me": Impact of the Holocaust

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Rena Trefman Cobrinik, writer and educator, speaks about growing up alongside a family of survivors and how the gravity of the Holocaust has remained a permanent fixture in her heart and mind.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Rena Trefman Cobrinik.

This excerpt is in Yiddish and English.

Rena Trefman Cobrinik was born in Bronx, New York in 1933.

Other video highlights from this oral history

"Right-On-The-Nose Kind of Language": Yiddish Being Used in Major English Newspapers

1 min 19 sec

Dancing in the Streets: Celebrating the Founding of the State of Israel

1 min 16 sec

Kvelling Over the Kinder's Yiddish

2 min 36 sec

Language-Learning Through Song

2 min 16 sec

Living in a Not-Very-Jewish Neighborhood

1 min 41 sec

Yiddishe Shule, Not Hebrew School

1 min 46 sec

What's a Mentsch?: Transmitting Jewish Values through A Yiddish Word

1 min 40 sec

Memories of Yiddish LIterature and Song at Shule

1 min 31 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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